


Good Enough

by ladykiki



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladykiki/pseuds/ladykiki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony's dying again. Somehow, the waking up after hasn't stopped being a surprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Enough

**Author's Note:**

> So sometimes things get stuck in my head. 
> 
> The blame for this fic belongs solely to TiggerToo who, in a random conversation one night, convinced me she'd read my Iron Man/Avengers fic, if I wrote it. So I called her bluff. 
> 
> (Turns out she wasn't bluffing.)

Don’t waste it, Yinsen said. Don’t waste your life.

The sky streaked black, and the world rumbled, swirling around and around, or he was, with brimstone on his tongue, and that thin face, with thin spectacles, leaned over him.

Don’t waste it, Stark.

He’d tried not to. Even if he was still a man who had everything and nothing. 

Something red swooped across his vision, and the sky wobbled, swooped, came back into focus when the sound fuzzed out—too far from the radio station to get the signal right. But Yinsen was there.

“Did I waste it?” he asked. Yinsen was leaning over Tony the way Tony had leaned over him, at the last, when he’d been filled with holes and lay dying in that cave. It didn’t take a genius to figure out, if their positions were reversed, that Tony was dying. “I didn’t, did I?”

Don’t waste your life, Yinsen said. 

He’d never figured a dead man’s words could have weight. His father’s certainly hadn’t. But Yinsen’s did, and they pushed him down, down, until the darkness swallowed him, and it was too late to listen.

*

He woke up, and for a panicked moment couldn’t breathe. 

“Easy, Stark,” Yinsen said. His hand pressed flat to Tony’s chest, above the port he’d installed, above the electromagnet that was keeping him alive. The weight was grounding. Warm. “You’re here. It’s just you and me.”

Tony grabbed the hand Yinsen still had on his chest and focused on breathing, deep and slow, drew a breath and felt the weight of the magnet, the edges of the port pressing against his lungs, the burn in his chest that centered around his heart that came and went and could be a problem or could be nothing. He hadn’t mentioned it to Yinsen. He was dying anyway, would probably be dead inside a week, and he didn’t want to know if there was more than shrapnel hunting him. 

“That’s it.”

Turning his head, Tony looked past the older man to the mirror mounted on the post, to the razor tucked sideways onto the little lip at the bottom. There was something pathetic, Tony was aware, in finding more comfort from the presence of inanimate objects than the living person standing over him, but that was about par for the course, here. 

“They kept you for a long time.”

He blinked and saw the bottom of the barrel, saw it waver, felt the jolt, sharp and bright and missing a beat. 

Tony sucked in air, to prove he could, and swung his feet quickly to the floor. Yinsen took a step back. 

“You could end this,” Yinsen said. 

Tony stared unblinking at the floor. “I won’t betray my country.”

“Ah,” Yinsen said, in that soft, mocking way he had. “But if you don’t, you will die.”

*

“Breathe, Tony. Keep breathing.”

*

His head went underwater.

He pushed back against the hand on his neck and got nowhere but further down. The barrell’s edge cut into his stomach. Someone put their weight on his back. Black ate at the edges of his vision, and the walls (wood, they were wood, he could break them if only he could have his hands and his feet) were closing in. 

He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he couldn’t breathe. 

The water followed him when they pulled him up, but he didn’t care. They didn’t give him enough time with the air, to pull it into his lungs, to balk at a little in his mouth. 

Then they caught him on an exhale (waiting, they’d been waiting, ready) and he couldn’t get any air in his lungs before he was sucking water. It flooded his mouth, his lungs, and he bucked, hard as he could, tried to turn his head out, saw white and black, and felt the jolt, felt the hole in the rhythm and couldn’t scream. 

*

“We’re losing him!”

“No, Tony! Come on, breathe. Just keep breathing. Just a little longer. Tony! Tony. . . .”

*

Tony stood with Yinsen when the locked clanged and the thick iron door scraped open. He put his hands on his head and locked his jaw, his spine, his knees, and didn’t watch the men enter, but he entertained the thought of grabbing one of the minion’s automatics and opening up against whoever was closest. It’d end with him riddled with bullets, but that had to beat drowning. 

He missed when Abu entered, had spent so much time ignoring their demands that he hadn’t realized the fat little man was speaking until Yinsen did. 

Yinsen said, “He says they grow tired of playing games with you. He says he is running out of patience. If you will not make the Jericho, he does not need you.”

Abu waited until Tony looked at him.

“He says,” Yinsen said, “that they will give you one more chance.”

“What does that mean?”

Abu stepped back without answering, without waiting for Yinsen to translate, and waved his minions forward. One grabbed his arms. Another pulled a burlap sack over his head. Tony wondered if it was the same one he’d worn for the ransom demand. He thought he could smell blood. 

They released his arms, then shoved the car battery into them. He walked when they pushed and tried not to feel relieved when they didn’t take the same turn as usual. They never let him see where he was going, when they removed him from his cell, so he couldn’t know if this new destination was better. 

He didn’t expect to end up outside. The sun was blinding. 

“Don’t die here, Stark,” Yinsen murmured, close to his ear. 

“They’re going to kill me,” he murmured back, “and even if they don’t, I’ll probably be dead in a week.”

Abu gestured at the piles of Stark Industries weapons with the smug certainty of a man holding all the cards, and the showmanship of a second-rate circus. Yinsen said, “He says they have everything you need to build the Jericho missile.”

They didn’t, but Tony only wanted to know how they’d gotten what they did have. Stark Industries did not sell to terrorists. 

“He says,” Yinsen said, “that once you have built the Jericho, he will set you free.”

“I can’t betray my country,” Tony said. 

Don’t die here, Stark. 

“You are the great Tony Stark,” Yinsen said, weight behind the words that should have been mocking, had been mocking the last time Tony heard them. “I have faith that you can do both.”

*

He floated to the surface and bobbed against his skin, just under it, aware of space and light beyond the dark, beyond his skin. He smelled antiseptic cleaner and heard a rhythmic beeping, bi-toned and electronic, and he followed them to the surface. He pried his eyes open through sheer force of will. 

Bruce Banner leaned into his field of vision. “Hey, there,” he said. “The nurse will be here in just a minute.”

“What happened?” Tony asked—tried to ask, because his lips felt thick and his throat closed over the sounds before he’d gotten past the first syllable. 

“Easy.” Bruce looked past him. Since this was a hospital (they had better have a good reason for admitting him to a hospital), it probably meant he was checking the readings on the monitor. “Are you in pain? Blink twice for yes.”

Tony held his eyes open as long as he could, and got Bruce to quirk one side of his mouth.

“Here,” Bruce said. His fingers brushed Tony’s lips around a point of cold. “You were hit with a direct blast from Doom’s new energy weapon. The suit saved your life, but it didn’t stop all of the damage.”

Tony told himself that nothing could be worse than waking up attached to a car battery, with the old metal piece protruding from his skin. He told himself that and looked down and didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed that everything looked the same. 

“You have second and third degree burns to a large section of your stomach and right side,” Bruce explained, possibly in reaction to his expression. Tony wished he knew what it was saying. “The metal around the casing bent and damaged the arc reactor, but that’s fixed now. You’re going to be fine.”

He wiggled his toes, just to be sure, then his fingers. “Where’s—” His throat closed over the words, just like the first time, and Tony grimaced, lifted his hand with the vague idea that he could somehow use it to claw his throat open and spit the words out, but Bruce took it before he’d reached the halfway point and cradled it between both of his.

“Steve and Thor are in a meeting with Fury,” Bruce answered, which either meant Tony was becoming predictable or Bruce had spent too much time around him and was starting to share his thoughts. “Clint and Natasha smuggled a couple of the energy guns past SHIELD and are dropping them at the Tower under pretense of putting you together an overnight bag.”

How long have I been here? Tony thought, focusing intently on Bruce’s eyes, the better to test the thought sharing hypothesis, but Bruce looked away. 

“You, um.” Bruce cleared his throat. “You had us really worried there, for awhile.”

“Sorry,” Tony croaked, but the word was recognizable—what justice was there in that?—so he decided to try a few more: “There wasn’t any kissing, was there?” 

Bruce didn’t smile, or answer, just stared, and Tony was three long blinks into convincing his body not to go to sleep before his brain kicked out a reason—namely that Bruce hadn’t been there for the post-nuke wake-up. He swallowed hard, and felt his throat clicked and clench and ache, and even the thought of explaining that incident made him tired. 

Maybe he’d wait for that one, until after the nurse gave him a sponge bath. 

“Tony, you—” Tony looked up, but Bruce grimaced and dropped his gaze. “When we were trying to get you out of the suit, so the paramedics could help you, you said something. Do you remember?”

Tony shook his head. 

“You asked someone if you’d wasted it.”

Don’t waste it, Yinsen said. Don’t waste your life.

“What is it you didn’t want to waste?”

Tony breathed. His eyes closed, he pulled air in through his nose, then pushed it out slow, and pulled it in. . . .

“Tony?”

The air rushed out through his mouth. “My life,” he admitted. I shouldn’t be alive, he thought, and opened his eyes to transmit that thought to Bruce, unless it was for a reason. 

Bruce squeezed his hand and took up Tony’s breathing exercise, which reminded Tony that it had been Bruce’s breathing exercise, and whenever this conversation next came up (if it did, it was sometimes hard to tell, with Bruce, what he’d consider referential) Tony was blaming this entire conversation on the drugs. The drugs made him do it. 

Then Bruce squeezed his hand again, and Tony would never be able to explain how he knew it was a bid for attention, but he knew it was so he pried his eyes back open. 

“You haven’t,” Bruce said. 

The rush of warmth and the prickle of tears were unexpected and unwelcome and Tony was blaming them on the drugs, too, if anyone asked. But he managed to hitch a smile onto his face just as the door opened and the promised nurse walked in, and said, “I know.” 

Or at least mouthed it. That was good enough.


End file.
